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Charlize Theron Biography

What made Charlize Theron a star was her transformation from offscreen beauty to onscreen nightmare as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the Patty Jenkins film Monster (2003, co-starring Christina Ricci). The film won her an Oscar as best actress and launched her into the top tier of leading ladies.

Born in South Africa, Theron was a ballerina and model before getting attention as an actress in the Tom Hanks film That Thing You Do (1996) and the Woody Allen film Celebrity (1998).

She played a New England ingenue in the 1999 art house hit The Cider House Rules, and by the year 2000 she was starring in big budget pictures like Reindeer Games (with Ben Affleck) and Robert Redford‘s The Legend of Bagger Vance (alongside stars Matt Damon and Will Smith).

She won a second Oscar nomination for North Country (2005), but the highly-anticipated Aeon Flux (2005) was raspberried by the critics and spurned by moviegoers. Her other films include The Italian Job (2003, starring Mark Wahlberg), the 2007 Paul Haggis film In the Valley of Elah (starring Tommy Lee Jones), the Jason Reitman comedy Young Adult (2011), the Ridley Scott sci-fi epic Prometheus (2012), Snow White and the Huntsman (2012, starring Kristen Stewart), Fury Road (2015, the George Miller Mad Max movie starring Tom Hardy) and the animated feature Kubo and the Two Strings (2016, as the voice of Monkey).

Extra credit

Charlize Theron was nearly cast to play Nomi, the role later taken by Elizabeth Berkley in the ill-fated movie Showgirls… The gossip sheets like to make hay out of the fact that Charlize Theron’s mom shot and killed her dad back in 1991; the official story is that her dad was abusive. Her mother was never prosecuted… Aeon Flux was a cartoon character from the early 1990s, created by Peter Chung.